Michael A. De Leon is a graphic designer by day, but wears many hats in his off time. In 2004, after several years of covering the Spurs, he started Project Spurs, a Spurs team fansite as an outlet to provide content to Spurs fans, while continuing to write for himself and learning the ins and outs of online publishing and web design. He has since built a writing team and started a popular weekly Spurs podcast called the Spurscast.

Note: This is an mySA.com City Brights Blog. These blogs are not written or edited by mySA or the San Antonio Express-News. The authors are solely responsible for the content.

Life After Death: Health Meets Pride

So that just happened. Forty-two games are in the book, the NBA season’s official midway now in the rear view, and the Spurs are exactly where everyone thought they’d be.

San Antonio, Texas.

But their league standing? Not even the most optimistic or delusional of fans could have seen this start coming. An improvement? Sure. The San Antonio Spurs ranking amongst the top handful of teams? Absolutely. A little good fortune on the health front and the added bonus of some actual continuity with a returning roster largely intact, surely the Spurs would be improved and avoid the type of start that plagued their 2009-10 campaign. But 36-6? Let me repeat that: 36-6? Yeah, that just happened.

Coming into the 2010-11 season, a reasonable expectation—and a tad optimistic for some—would have been a Western Conference finals appearance or even a loss to the eventual Finals participant. If the Spurs could just manage to stay upright and keep their pieces on the floor, the talent was certainly there for them to hold their own against any team in the league. But they had a ceiling.

The Spurs weren’t a team deemed by most to be championship-caliber, not without a move or two anyway. Few if any believed them to be on the same level as the Lakers or Celtics or even the talent taken to and amassed on South Beach. For all intents and purposes, this Spurs team’s title aspirations were on life support, a ventilator being the only hope for one last championship breath. They were the old guard. The elite of the league, well, they had passed them by. Someone apparently failed to notify the Spurs, though. Or, maybe they’ve just benefited from a sort of selective amnesia—placebo’s are all the rage, just ask George Hill about his extraordinary bracelet.